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this thing called plot
Feb. 24th, 2014 09:37 amI used to describe myself, writing-wise as a pantser (writing by the seat of my pants). This is true -- I do tend to go into a story with only a vague idea of what's going on, and build it up from the inside. I would sail into a first draft, ride the high, and then get bogged down in rewrites.
But my best and most complete writing experiences could better be described as "iterative pantsing" -- I write to figure out where I'm going, then go back and edit to make sure things hang together on the front end, then write a little farther, then edit as necessary.
The pros of this are that the finished work is a lot more polished and a lot less "well, it's patently obvious that I had no idea what to do next for these two chapters..."
The cons are that it takes much longer to write this way. You get a spurt of glorious narrative flow, followed by a day or two of review and cleanup.
I've just finished a bit of cleanup and am back to the narrative flow, but as I follow this one I'm pretty sure that there might need to be a bit more restructuring than usual on the front end. Which makes this particular high a bit less fun -- but will probably make the resulting story better.
=-=-=-=-=-=
In other news, I was rereading my first novel-length fanfic (it's no longer posted online). It's better than I remember, although it's been completely trashed by canon in the meantime. (I knew that was going to happen; I wrote it between books 4 and 5 of HP.) I still like it, though.
When I wrote that one, I did it in spurts and snatches, often out of order -- just sort of following whatever scene appealed to me, then stitching up the bits later. I remember that the last scene I wrote was actually somewhere in the middle of the story.
On my current non-fanfic work, I've taken a similar approach -- writing scenes as they appeal, then tucking them at the end of the Word doc until I need them. (Sometimes they aren't used; sometimes they have to be heavily changed.) I'm not sure whether it's better than just plowing through directly, but it does make those scenes more powerful, I think, that I write them when they're fresh in my mind. Also it helps me know where my characters' minds are going.
But my best and most complete writing experiences could better be described as "iterative pantsing" -- I write to figure out where I'm going, then go back and edit to make sure things hang together on the front end, then write a little farther, then edit as necessary.
The pros of this are that the finished work is a lot more polished and a lot less "well, it's patently obvious that I had no idea what to do next for these two chapters..."
The cons are that it takes much longer to write this way. You get a spurt of glorious narrative flow, followed by a day or two of review and cleanup.
I've just finished a bit of cleanup and am back to the narrative flow, but as I follow this one I'm pretty sure that there might need to be a bit more restructuring than usual on the front end. Which makes this particular high a bit less fun -- but will probably make the resulting story better.
=-=-=-=-=-=
In other news, I was rereading my first novel-length fanfic (it's no longer posted online). It's better than I remember, although it's been completely trashed by canon in the meantime. (I knew that was going to happen; I wrote it between books 4 and 5 of HP.) I still like it, though.
When I wrote that one, I did it in spurts and snatches, often out of order -- just sort of following whatever scene appealed to me, then stitching up the bits later. I remember that the last scene I wrote was actually somewhere in the middle of the story.
On my current non-fanfic work, I've taken a similar approach -- writing scenes as they appeal, then tucking them at the end of the Word doc until I need them. (Sometimes they aren't used; sometimes they have to be heavily changed.) I'm not sure whether it's better than just plowing through directly, but it does make those scenes more powerful, I think, that I write them when they're fresh in my mind. Also it helps me know where my characters' minds are going.
